Thought Leadership on Social Technology and Social Marketing

Tuesday May 20, 2014

Getting Social Media Examiner’s annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report is like opening a present on your birthday. It’s always intriguing to find out what you social marketers are doing and plan on doing. It’s also interesting to see if the answers you give on surveys match up to the actions you’re taking in the real world.

Let’s take a look at some of this year’s findings and give you something to seriously think about for each.

Hm…could it be that your inability to wrap your arms around maximizing engagement, measuring the KPI’s that affect your business goals, and being able to accurately and relevantly target your audience has something to do with those social management tools you’re also struggling with? Multiple, non-integrated tools would leave anyone struggling in this environment.

2. 37% of you say you can measure the ROI of your social, up from 26% last year. 68% of you analyze your social.

Hm…I’m thinking about the 32% that don’t analyze their social activities. If even those that do have taken 4 years to get to this still non-impressive point of ROI measurement, those that don’t need to play some serious catch-up with a robust analytics platform.

3. 83% of you said you’ve integrated social into your traditional marketing activities.

Hm…you have? I get the queasy feeling many of you answered “yes” to this question if you put a social sharing button on an email newsletter. True integration comes in the form of a widely social-enabled enterprise, and we happen to know 83% of you aren’t there yet.

4. 64% of you use social 6 or more hours a week, 37% of you are on it 11+ hours weekly, and 19% put 20 hours into it per week.

Hm…I’m so confused by these stats I don’t really know where to start. Someone will have to tell me what social media’s operating hours are and how you’re not managing your social channels 24/7/365.

5. Most of you are using social to develop loyal fans (72%) and to get market intelligence (71%).

Hm…how’s that loyal fan development coming? Because study after study shows brands woefully falling short of responding to customers reaching out on social, especially for customer service issues. Many brands’ social channels are merely new ways to anger customers.

Hm…while it’s true this list alters depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C, it doesn’t look like mobile is on your mind, an essential ingredient of right person/right time/right place/right way marketing. You do get points for ranking video/YouTube higher on your priority list though.